Composer and lyricist Darren Clark wrote the music and co-wrote the lyrics for the musical 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button', which has been nominated for four Laurence Olivier Awards. Darren attended Otago in the early 2000s and was involved in around 30 shows during his student days.
Fifteen years ago, composer and lyricist Darren Clark would look out at London’s Royal Albert Hall from his office across the street, watching the audiences, orchestras and stars come and go to concerts and award ceremonies. This Sunday he will be one of those stars, waiting in the audience to hear if the musical The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes home a clutch of Laurence Olivier Awards.
Darren wrote the music for the show and co-wrote the lyrics along with musical bookwriter Jethro Compton, and the show has been nominated for Best New Musical.
The Oliviers are presented annually by the Society of London Theatre, for excellence in professional theatre in London. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, playing at Ambassadors Theatre in the West End, has four nominations, including Best New Musical, Best Actor in a Musical, Best Actress in a Musical, and Darren, along with Mark Aspinall, has received an individual nomination for Outstanding Musical Contribution for musical supervision, orchestration and arrangements.
Amongst glowing reviews, the Daily Mail described the show as “epic and cinematic” with a tremendous score.
“It’s a very strange experience for me because I’ve been watching those awards for however many years,” says Darren from his home in Maidstone, Kent.
“I used to work in the Royal College of Music as an administrator, [and] every now and then I’d look over at the Royal Albert Hall, and walk around it, and sometimes go inside and have a look. So to think that in a week’s time, one of my songs is going to be performed on that stage in front of 6,000 audience members and a million people in the TV audience, is mad, absolutely mad.”
But it’s been a long, hard journey to make it across the road and up the Royal Albert Hall steps. And it’s a journey that had its beginnings at the University of Otago, back in the early 2000s.
After switching from Victoria University to Otago (more independence away from home), and from Archaeology (too hard) to Classical Studies, Darren embraced every opportunity at Otago and in Dunedin to further his love of songwriting, music and theatre.
“I was always into theatre. I wanted to perform in amateur shows and I auditioned for the Les Mis 2001 production at the Regent, and the whole cast was students. I met physicists, med students, lawyers, some music students, all these people who had a love of theatre, and they became my close circle of people. I had the most brilliant time.”
He was involved in around 30 shows during his student days, and spent a lot of time at Allen Hall and with the theatre department. It was also a formative time for his songwriting, and he made good use of the music rooms and pianos on campus, sometimes writing music for a show. He managed to fit in one course in music theory into his degree.
With friends, he formed a band and competed in Battle of the Bands in the Student Union.
“We were terrible. I remember sitting outside in the van afterwards shaking our heads at how appalling we were, but that’s when my songwriting really started.”
After graduating with a BA in 2003, he returned home to Wellington, met a fellow actor, Kate, in a show and eventually followed her to London. Kate encouraged him to do some gigs and he got involved in the folk circuit in London and around the UK.
“I wrote lots and lots of songs, I did lots and lots of gigs and found it utterly soul destroying, ultimately because it’s such hard work to get people to listen.”
Then one day, a theatre-director friend asked him to write a song for her Christmas show.
“To have an audience who would actually just sit there and listen was revolutionary for me. I’ve gradually been pushing in that direction ever since, so 17 or 18 years. It was a gradual, glacial career progression.”
“They played the song at the show and everyone just sat there and listened and I thought ‘that’s brilliant, that’s what I want’.
“To have an audience who would actually just sit there and listen was revolutionary for me. I’ve gradually been pushing in that direction ever since, so 17 or 18 years. It was a gradual, glacial career progression.”
His next big break was getting into the finals of the music theatre writers’ competition, the Stiles + Drewe Prize for Best New Song. Seeing his song performed on the West End stage was “insane”.
This was followed with being awarded, with his friend Rhys Jennings, the inaugural Music Theatre International Stiles + Drewe Mentorship Award, for a musical they’d been working on for five years. The award gave them a year’s worth of workshops, mentoring, a concert at the end and a retreat in France.
While this musical is still in the wings, the mentorship helped Darren make contacts in the industry, which eventually led to him writing the music and lyrics for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. The show’s producer had set it in a Cornish fishing village and wanted a folk music score, but the production was booked for six months’ time and he was without a composer.
“So he rang his friend Danielle Tarento and said ‘I’m desperate, I need someone who’s a folk composer who knows musical theatre and who’s a good communicator’. And she was like ‘this is your guy’.
“We met and the rest is history really. It was kind of like an amalgamation of a lot of random things that had occurred to me over years and they just met together in one perfect moment.”
The cast of 'The Curious Case of Benjamin Button' performs in London’s West End.
Looking at that journey, from amateur theatrics to watching his own show on the West End stage, Darren describes it as “dreamlike – when I look at it backwards".
“But when you’re going through it, it was everything that life should be really. It was joyful, it was hard, it was challenging, it was my lowest moments, it was my highest moments. It’s the work that I’m most proud of.”
Having grown up listening to Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Paul Simon and Bob Dylan, Darren describes his band music as a kind of new folk.
“That’s where my heart is, but I love exploring different types of music.
“I worked on a show recently that was all about the piano, so I just started aping all of the most wonderful pianists like Billy Joel, Elton John, Fats Domino, Scott Joplin. Another show is very Coldplay-esque , and I’ve written an Argentinian cabaret which is full of gypsy jazz and tango.
“I’m a magpie. I bend to the story, it’s whatever the story requires and inspires in me to write.”
He has many projects on the go, including a musical about English mathematician Alan Turing, and another called the Ordinary People Project, musicals which centre on the stories of people in towns in the UK.
He is a founding member of the Paper Balloon Theatre Company, dedicated to making original theatre for, with and by young audiences, and New UK Musicals, a project developed to help get the work of new musical theatre writers into the hands of performers through providing a platform for their sheet music.
Darren is keen to help new writers and provides candid and useful advice on his website and through his blog, on how to navigate the music theatre industry, sharing his own experiences and challenges.
“I would say if you could possibly be doing anything else you should do that. The only reason I can do it is because there’s just nothing else on the earth that I want to do.
“It’s not particularly well paid for a very, very, long time. You put your heart and soul into everything and often get very little back, apart from your own satisfaction. So if you’re doing it for money or any other reason than it’s just the only thing you must do, then you shouldn’t do it.”
And what does he hope for when he’s writing and composing?
“That people watching will come away with a sense of catharsis.
“That it will take them on a full journey, that it will speak to something in their lives, some point or something they maybe need to hear or want to hear. And it will speak to them about that beautifully and eloquently and in a humorous way. It’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you cry and you’ll come out feeling invigorated and knowing yourself a little better.
“That’s the dream for every audience member, that’s what I hope for.”
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